Not being a loser will get you a long way in life and forums are no different. They key to getting more traffic from forums is being popular but if you can’t handle that then starting popular threads will do the trick.
Popularity of forum threads is an easy formula. When first posted the power of a post lays entirely in its headline. If you are having trouble writing headlines check out writing titles for traffic. Once your thread has a been there for a while the number of replies will …

After reading Google and SEO: The Real Story you will understand more about targeting your neighbourhood. If you haven’t read it do that now. Done that? Good, now lets address the question you really came here for:
The essential 10 step checklist of FREE marketing techniques.
Understand that your niche may require a different order and to take advantage of other niche specific opportunities (such as blog carnivals for blogs, competitions for quality design etc).

The secret to better rankings and more traffic is being (or looking like) the cool guy in your neighbourhood.
The Neighbourhood
Search engines build their results based upon relevance. Your use of keywords is important, read How To Dial In Your Keywords, but the other major contributing factor is whether the search engine has determined that you are a part of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is all of the related sites to a search topic. A search engine will find out whether you have links from other popular sites within a neighbourhood …

Most authors are wasting their time producing quality articles that will never get read. 95% of a books success is based around the title of the book. Therefore if we just make the title catchy then our work will finally be read, right?
Wrong!